Stone Spring Read Online Free Page B

fragile, yet she had barely left the land. But her father, if he lived, was out on the breast of the wider ocean in a boat not much more substantial than this.
    Nobody spoke as the boats receded from the shore. Indeed it had been a long while since Sunta had said anything; she was just a heap of sealskin, with her crumpled white face barely visible beneath a hat of bear fur. Ana was glad of the silence, compared to the clamour and the foolishness that had plagued the day since the arrival of the Pretani boys.
    Lost in her thoughts, she was startled by a noise coming from the dark, beyond the waves’ lapping, a kind of shuffling, a snort of breath. The priest stopped paddling and put his finger to his lips. Then he pointed ahead.
    Suddenly Ana saw a black shape like a hole cut neatly out of the moonlit sky. This was North Island, a scrap of rock only exposed at low tide; already they had reached it.
    And on its tiny foreshore a bulky form stirred. It was a seal, a huge one, a bull.
    The priest dipped his paddle in the water and, almost noiselessly, swung the boat around to bring Ana alongside the seal. Only paces separated them. The seal, clearly visible now in the moonlight, was looking straight back at Ana, quite still, its eyes pools of blackness. She could make out no colours in its pelt.
    The priest smiled at her.
    She understood why. The seal was the best Other of all. The seal was a survivor of the days before death had come to the world, when humans had lived among the animals, and had shifted forms from one kind to another as easily as ice melts to water. That had ended when the little mothers made their lethal bargain with the moon, and so had saved the whole world from starvation as the undying animals ate all there was to eat. But just as humans and animals now had to die, so they could no longer share each other’s forms. A human was for ever a human, a dog a dog. The seals, however, had been too busy playing to hear of the little mothers’ bargain. And so they had become stuck in a middle form, neither of the land or the sea, with faces like dogs and bodies like fish, and there they had remained ever since, relics of a better time.
    Ana couldn’t look away from the seal’s deep, heavy gaze.
    But then, without warning, it slid off its rock, slipped into the water and vanished. The priest frowned, and Ana felt a stab of disappointment. Was the seal not to be her Other after all?

    The boats, quietly paddled, drifted towards the island.
    Jurgi nodded to Ana. ‘It is time.’
    She shucked off her cloak and opened up her tunic. Zesi helped her pull her boots off her feet. Then, uncertainly, the ring-symbol of Northland painted on her bare belly, she stood up in the boat and faced the island. The ice cold air was sharp on her flesh.
    The priest turned to the second boat. ‘Mama Sunta . . .’ Sunta, in the place of Ana’s mother, was to stand now, and drop into the ocean a rag stained with Ana’s first woman-blood, now dried and rust-brown. All this was to be performed in the light of the moon, the goddess of death, as a defiance of her dread legacy.
    But Sunta didn’t move. Rute, her daughter, reached over and touched her shoulder. The old woman seemed to start awake, but her eyes were unseeing. She clutched at her belly, at the thing growing inside her. Ana, standing in the cold air, smelled an acrid stink of piss and shit; Sunta’s bowels had emptied. Then she fell back, limp, and sighed like a receding tide. Rute shook her. ‘Mama Sunta!’ But Sunta moved no more.
    And a clatter of wings came from the island. Ana, startled, would have fallen if Zesi had not helped her. She saw an owl, unmistakable, lift from a rocky ledge and make for the mainland, beating its great wings, its eerie flat face held before it.
    Ana sat, shivering, and Zesi put her arms around her. ‘The owl,’ Ana said. The owl that dared hunt only at night, in the domain of the moon, the goddess of death. The owl that had flown into